Outside the Beltway

Republicans in Disarray!

President Trump's Senate co-partisans are growing increasingly frustrated with him.

James Joyner · Thursday, June 18, 2026 · 7 comments

POLITICO (“Trump escalates his war on Senate Republicans — and senators are striking back“):

President Donald Trump is making life almost impossible for Senate Republicans — and these days fewer of them are willing to just let it slide.

Some lawmakers that were once happy to brush off impulsive and disruptive behavior by saying they hadn’t seen the president’s social media posts or that it was just “Trump being Trump” are increasingly willing to speak out against what they view as bad decisions that undermine their ability to deliver legislative wins as the midterms approach.

The latest irritation was the early-morning Truth Social post Wednesday that upended GOP hopes of quickly confirming a new director of national intelligence and reviving a surveillance bill that Trump already derailed earlier this month.

The chaos that followed Trump’s sudden U-turn on Jay Clayton’s nomination, just hours before a scheduled confirmation hearing, further loosened tongues in the Capitol hallways — even from lawmakers who tend to be reliable allies.

“The president’s timing and communication needs improvement,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) said. “I think it’s unfortunate. It throws a kicker into the system when we get going and then we have to readjust.”

Asked about frustration within the conference about the recent lack of coordination, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) added, “Well, duh.”

Kennedy added, “No, I don’t,” when asked if Trump takes senators into consideration: “He wants what he wants, and until he gets it, he just keeps pushing.”

The public frustrations are bubbling up at a crucial moment for Trump and Republicans more broadly. The president sent his wee-hours missive from France, where he was meeting with global leaders at the annual G7 conference and seeking to sell an Iran peace deal that many in his party despise.

Trump has faced recent pushback on several fronts in the Senate, with Republicans foiling plans to fund part of his White House ballroom project in a recent immigration funding deal and forcing the Justice Department to abandon plans for a $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” that could compensate Trump allies.

The president’s frequent demands that the Senate abandon its longstanding filibuster rule to pass more legislation along party lines, including a controversial elections overhaul, have also gone unheeded — adding to Trump’s obvious frustration.

He has now responded on several occasions by simply infuriating GOP senators who believe they are on the precipice of delivering a legislative win — only for Trump to suddenly pull the rug out from under them.

His announcement of the DOJ payout fund, for instance, delayed and nearly killed a critical immigration funding bill. And his decision to tap Bill Pulte, a close political ally who heads a housing agency, as acting director of national intelligence blew up a brewing three-year deal on reauthorizing a key piece of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who announced his retirement last year after breaking with Trump on policy legislation, said the dynamic is “undermining our ability to produce the very results he wants.”

Carl Hulse, NYT (“Trump Feuds With Thune and G.O.P., Stoking Election-Year Rift“):

President Trump may be trying to wind down his conflict with Iran, but he is escalating his war with Senate Republicans.

Mr. Trump blindsided his supposed allies in the Senate on Wednesday with a rocket of a social media post from across the Atlantic, tying together a host of his pet peeves about the Senate while yanking his new nominee for national intelligence director from his confirmation hearing just hours before it was to occur.

It was an extraordinary move from a president whose own party controls the chamber, but just the latest sign of a major rupture between Mr. Trump and G.O.P. senators as the midterm elections approach.

[…]

On top of pulling back his nominee, Mr. Trump piled on even more stringent conditions. He demanded that Senate Republicans attach stalled legislation on voting restrictions to a critical surveillance bill, and insisted that he would not move forward with Mr. Clayton until his replacement as the U.S. attorney was confirmed — a process that would take weeks at a minimum and would face Democratic resistance.

Doing so would also likely require Senate Republicans to jettison both the chamber’s signature filibuster and the Judiciary Committee’s so-called blue slip tradition, which gives home-state senators veto power over Federal District Court judges, United States attorneys and federal marshals.

Mr. Thune has staked his reputation as a Senate leader on preserving the legislative filibuster, so in essence the president was demanding that Mr. Thune torch his own legacy for a voting measure that so far has not drawn sufficient support to pass.

The remarkable Senate tumult imperiled an expired intelligence law and shifted the political conversation away from the G.O.P.’s preferred midterm message on tax cuts and affordability.

But the tension has been rising for weeks, after Mr. Trump endorsed the primary opponents of two G.O.P. incumbents who subsequently lost. Those moves were seen by many Republicans as slaps at Mr. Thune and clear indications that the president was putting his personal political grievances and desires ahead of the interests of the party.

Senate Republicans have also raised objections to the president’s ballroom project, a proposed fund to pay damages to Jan. 6 defendants, the special protection from tax audits he was given by the Department of Justice, as well as the selection of Mr. Pulte. And many of them, including Mr. Thune, have declined to praise his cease-fire deal with Iran, noting that they had not been briefed on it.

Asked on Wednesday what he thought Mr. Trump was trying to achieve with his machinations, Mr. Thune had a brief response. “Good question,” he said.

POLITICO (“Senate Republicans in no hurry to deliver Trump’s next reconciliation bill“):

President Donald Trump is calling for Republicans to pass a $350 billion bill to fund the military while notching conservative policy victories — and GOP senators aren’t exactly scurrying to action.

House Republican leaders and committee chairs have been meeting for weeks about what to include in a new party-line reconciliation package. Speaker Mike Johnson has also had conversations about the House’s vision with Senate Majority Leader John Thune.

But the Senate has taken no concrete steps toward advancing a bill, and GOP senators and aides said this week it was becoming clear any “Reconciliation 3.0” would be a House-led effort. Multiple Senate Republicans — including members of leadership — say they don’t currently see a path that could marshall 50 votes behind such a measure on their side of the Capitol just months before the midterms.

“Everybody has a different concept of what they want, which is going to be the problem,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said in an interview this week.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said a third bill “doesn’t look to me like it’s got a lot of life in it,” while Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) separately warned that if his party was going to pass a third reconciliation bill, Republicans need to “saddle up and ride hard, because we’re running out of time.”

“You don’t have to be a senior at Cal Tech to know that the closer you get to the midterms, the harder it is to get anything done around here,” Kennedy added.

[…]

Their posture is being influenced by the math within their own conference: With a 53-seat majority, Thune can only afford to lose three GOP senators with Vice President JD Vance casting a tie-breaking vote.

Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins of Maine and Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky — another senior GOP appropriator who is currently hospitalized — both predicted during a recent hearing that a third reconciliation bill would not happen. Collins separately told reporters “it would be very difficult to get a third reconciliation bill approved.”

But with the annual bipartisan appropriations process collapsing in the Senate, some Republicans see reconciliation as the only path forward to fund certain programs — as the GOP did with “Reconciliation 2.0” that funded Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol for the duration of Trump’s term.

Cornyn said appropriators were skeptical of a third reconciliation bill because “it basically carves them out of the process.” But he added, “I don’t think there’s any other way to deal with things like defense spending.”

Meanwhile, Senate GOP fiscal hawks could also blow up the process by demanding pay-fors for Trump’s military funding request in the form of cuts to health care services. It’s a reality Thune acknowledged as he recently explained the challenges of advancing another reconciliation bill, noting that while most Republicans would unite around defense spending, “it certainly wouldn’t be limited to just that.”

The party is sufficiently factionalized that getting agreement on much of anything was always going to be challenging. Adding in thin margins, geriatric members who are no-shows, and tensions with the President doesn’t exactly help.

As I’ve noted many times, President Trump’s ability to strongarm Congressional Republicans is like nothing else I’ve ever seen. Because he has such a strong hold over the base, his threats to endorse a challenger in the primaries are intimidating. But, of course, that comes with the considerable downside of creating resentment. And Senators who are lame ducks because Trump carried out that threat have nothing to fear and no incentive to help carry the water.